Bakuda's Time Capsule
by GreatWyrmGold
Summary: Inspired by the r/parahumans writing prompt from the sixth of April, 2015, the Bakuda bomb that trapped one of the Protectorate's most promising heroes (and two other guys) in a bubble of slowed time starts to wear off, freeing these capes at last.
1. Chapter 1

Last week on the Worm subreddit, ughzubat recently started what he hopes to be a tradition of weekly writing prompts. One of last Monday's was as follows: "[Y]ou're a young, low-powered native to the post-apocalypse that Dauntless &amp; Co wake up to once the time bubble ends. You have to show the relics from the Age of Heroes the way of the new world. I decided to write that one, and then decided to polish and expand the fragment and put it here. If people like it, I might continue it.

EDIT: I'm definitely continuing this. Also, while looking up Dauntless's birth name, I discovered that Velocity was not, in fact, in the time bubble; instead, it was someone named Jotun, presumably either a vigilante or villain since his birth name wasn't put on the memorial. The previous chapter has been adjusted to compensate.

Now I basically have an OC to create. ...Whoo?

* * *

Cynthia Hodge looked over the old ruins. Millennia ago, it had been a city called The Bay. The historians said it was home to some of the greatest of the first capes—Marquis and the Allfather, Lung or Dragon, whichever one almost beat up an Endbringer, the Keeper before she was the Keeper. Cynthia paid a lot more attention to history after she triggered, but there were enough disasters over these past centuries—including one that happened in Cynthia's grandparents' life—to make it difficult to find the information she looked for. There were plenty of legends, though if the histories were accurate, the legends weren't. Common knowledge told you of a cape named Dragon, who was the world's best tinker and had a mechanical suit that got more powerful the longer a fight went on; it turned out that this was a combination of two capes, one of who had a name that meant "dragon".

Legends told you many things, some of them trustworthy. One legend which seemed trustworthy was that the land around the old city had been lowered by Golden Dawn—no one could deny that it was a lot lower than the surrounding land. Another was that the entire city had been cursed by Marquis when heroes kidnapped his daughters; histories ancient and recent did show a series of terrible events befalling the area. Aside from the Gimbal Gate, its tower, and the small town around it, The Bay had been abandoned since before living memory, and even Nebroc Town on the other side had more than its share of misfortune. But the most credible local legend was that when an Endbringer attacked The Bay, it trapped three of the world's most promising heroes, Bay residents, in a bubble. Cynthia and many, many others saw the bubble; it was considered a holy site by saw the bubble, and saw that lately, the dust and flower petals within had been speeding up. She wondered if the bubble would collapse soon, releasing the heroes.

It might be worth checking the bubble again, just to be safe.

Cynthia headed down to the Bubble Shrine, where the three heroes lay. She tried to remember what she knew of them. The legends called them Fearlessness, Endurance, and Purity, but histories identified the first of those as Dauntless. Which meant basically the same thing as Fearless, so that's probably what happened. He supposedly had the potential to be the greatest hero on Earth before being trapped in the time-bubble. The others were almost unknown, aside from the scarce legends and questionable mythologies. Of course, it wasn't wise to talk about the myths like that to some people...and among them were many locals.

The bubble and the shrine around was open to the public. The area was crowded with people watching the bubble, and it wasn't hard to see why. The dust, grit, and flower petals within were clearing, falling to the ground, only slightly slowed near the edges and almost visibly nearer the now-visible forms of the three heroes. The first (and only woman) was maybe six feet tall, with long, unkempt, platinum blonde hair and what looked like medieval armor made of ice and metal, carrying an axe. Another wore white-and-gold armor, carrying a spear and a shield. His spear, shoes, and the outer rim of the shield looked like they were made of some kind of energy. Both of them had paler skin than anyone Cynthia had ever seen, except for the occasional aberrant, but the third was paler still, with literally white skin. He wore archaic-looking clothes; aside from maybe the glowing one, they didn't look like what Cynthia thought people in the Age of Heroes would. They also didn't seem to be moving...yet?

Cynthia heard a lot of people arguing about who was who. Most people thought the whitest man was Purity, but some said the armored one was him, and no one agreed on who looked most like Endurance or Fearlessness. There were religious people, too, who revered the three as holy men. They brought their own arguments into it, making the whole thing even less pleasant.

Cynthia left, and headed back to her village. The Bay area wasn't heavily populated—there hadn't been a lot of people all along the coast for decades, actually, but the Bay was supposed to be cursed, so people wanted to settle other places first. There were a few villages around, including several aberrant camps for people who couldn't fit in except with other misfits. Some of them were little better than bandits, but Cynthia's village had a few powerful people who held them off.

One of them was Will Jackson, who had a neat motion-nullifying field that protected him from harm, basically letting him hit people with his big rusty axe with impunity until they left the village alone. Emmanuel was his son, and one of Cynthia's closest friends. He only had a kinda boring telekinetic field, which also gave people in the area a bit of sense of what was around them, a sort of weak danger sense. Still, he was a good kid, even if he wouldn't be a great warrior like his dad without a lot of work.

The Jacksons were the first people she told about the bubble speeding up. They didn't really believe it, but decided they'd see in the morning. Cynthia told the rest of her village, too; they didn't care that much. The Bubble Shrine devotees would be in an uproar about it, and same with the Keeper's Children since the three were from the Age of Heroes and lived where the first Keeper did, but Cynthia and everyone else in her village followed the Old God.

That evening, Emmanuel went to Cynthia's house and dared her to go to the Bubble Shrine tonight. She took the dare, and the two of them sneaked out of the village and down the road to the Bay. They reached the Bubble Shrine not long after the sun set, and convinced the devotees there to let them in, though he warned them that they probably wouldn't see anything, because there were a lot of people there.

Cynthia and Emmanuel tried to push their way through the crowd, but failed. Luckily for them, a siren went off. Cynthia and Emmanuel knew what it meant—there was someone raiding the town. Most of the devotees were young enough to be among the town's militia, so they left, leaving just a few old men and women, plus the adolescents from out of town. With the Shrine empty, Cynthia could clearly see the three figures within moving. She watched them for a few minutes, realizing they were running. Running from what?

Whether because the bubble was weaker at the edges or because it was losing its hold on time within (or both?), the three were moving more quickly. As they moved out of the areas of the bubble more choked by dust and the like, Cynthia realized that they didn't look heroic or valiant or anything so much as they looked scared and confused. Sounds of fighting came from without. Finally, the heroes were moving at normal speed, leaving the bubble. They looked around, confused.

"Which of you is which?" Cynthia blurted out. "I mean, what are your names?"

The three looked at her, the white one seeming almost angry, the others just confused. The glowing one asked something in gibberish, but no one answered. The woman asked the armored one a question, and he nodded. The two of them went outside, while the white one stayed.


	2. Chapter 2

"Care! Fire in the hole!" Dauntless backed up as Miss Militia fired a shot from her grenade launcher, then reloaded it and repeated the process twice more. She didn't need to reload...usually. This was not a usual fight, however, and Militia was not using her usual tactics. The PRT had recently confiscated a number of bombs made by a tinker named Bakuda, and while they were initially earmarked to be sent to the Guild for analysis, the men upstairs authorized them to use some of the spares on Leviathan. The only problem was, they didn't know what any of the bombs did.

The first landed near Leviathan's legs, too close to Dauntless for comfort, and exploded into a mess of golden thread. Sticky, evidently. The second exploded in midair, barely catching Leviathan in its area of effect, but it looked like part had been knocked off, and Leviathan was definitely trying to get away. The third hit a bit behind Leviathan's feet...and there was a shimmer, encasing parts of Leviathan's lower body. The water in the sphere was slowing down.

Before Dauntless could rejoice that they had, perhaps, trapped Leviathan, it pulled itself free of the sphere, before whipping its tail though the air, catching Dauntless, throwing him through the air. The wind was driven from his lungs as he hit the ground, and he heard two other thumps, strangely distorted. He looked up in time to see the entire city collapse straight downward and the sky flash red-brown.

Dauntless was inside the sphere.

He got up, trying to move towards the edge. The sphere didn't seem to slow down time uniformly, and being too close to the center felt...odd. He saw two other people moving at close to normal speed, one of Empire Eighty-Eight's lesser capes and some armored axewoman he didn't recognize; beyond them, beyond this little bubble, the world was blurring from speed and dust, coming in faster than it could fall down. There was a tower, with some kind of glowing thing at the top that stayed stationary as the rest of the tower blurred, shifting, occasionally vanishing and regrowing. A city rose and fell in a fraction of a second, followed by smaller towns, none staying static long enough for Dauntless to make out any specific building. Stranger things appeared as well, flashes of color splashed across the scene too fast to be made out.

"What's going on?" asked the Empire cape. Dauntless just shrugged and stepped towards the edge. He felt the piece of ground they were on starting to fall, presumably held up by the part in the center. Or maybe some other effect of the bomb? Dauntless regularly worked with two tinkers, and he didn't pretend to think their technology made sense.

Was the outside slowing down? Just as Dauntless decided that yes, it was slowing a little, a building started climbing up towards them. Before Dauntless could think, the outside was a room, with a blurring crowd slowing down every second.

"Should we leave?" asked the mystery woman.

"...I suppose?"

Time continued to slow outside before they walked out.

The room was mostly empty, with only half a dozen people, all somewhat dark-skinned—not as dark as black people, but definitely darker than white ones. _And I have a white supremacist with me. This should be fun._ Four looked like they might be some kind of priests, which unsettled Dauntless a bit. He'd experienced his share of hero worship, but never literally, and he wasn't sure he liked the idea. The other two were just kids, though kids wearing what looked like a cross between Reinassance Fair garb and something out of anime. One of them asked him a question in a language that sounded like...no language he'd ever heard, actually. It had a pattern and speed more like English than Spanish or Japanese or something, but aside from that it was alien.

"Um...do any of you understand Eng—the language I'm speaking?" His question was met with confused silence, save for sounds from outside. Fighting.

"Should we...go out?" the woman asked. She had a faint accent, maybe German or Scandinavian. Dauntless didn't know what to say, so he just nodded. The two of them left through the nearest door, leaving the villain behind. They found themselves on a balcony. Outside was chaos—a fight between what must be at least one team of case 53's and several teams of locals.

"I'm Dauntless. You probably know all about me."

"Jotun. Brute powers, some short-ranged cryokinesis. Both like making ice and controlling it."

"Mm. Not top-tier, but it's what we've got."

"Who do we fight?"

Dauntless looked at the crowd. It was night, but the battle was lit by two pyrokinetics, both standing in a lower window of the wooden tower they were in. _Seems safe._ Meanwhile, on the ground, a 53 with long limbs, yellow skin, and spines was shooting arcs of electricity about.

"The 53's, I think. I think they're the ones attacking."

"The what?"

"The...I don't know what you'd call them, the...inhuman ones."

"Ah." The woman—Jotun—leaped off the tower, landing in the middle of a few 53 Brute-looking capes, with a burst of ice holding them in place as she struck at their arms with her axe. Dauntless considered following, before deciding to take the more cautious route down. He entered the room and found that the Empire cape had left; after fruitlessly asking how to reach the battle, Dauntless just blundered through the tower, eventually finding himself at the ground floor.

Several of the 53's were already fleeing, like civilians running from an Endbringer. Jotun was strong, but surely not that strong? _Maybe they think she's a god._ That thought, again. There were still others, though, and Dauntless began to fight, using his arclance to strike out across the battlefield. Nonlethal when he could, lethal when he had to. With some of the enemies breaking at the mere sight of Dauntless and Jotun, and with some of the locals seeming inspired by their presence, the locals' victory was swift. Some of the priests urged the two fish-out-of-water back into the tower, along with several Case 53 captives.

They stopped back at the top of the tower, with Alabaster. The priests shooed the three of them into the middle of the room, onto the once time-frozen pavement where they had been trapped for a minute and an eon. The captives were restrained by bonds and by some of the local capes, one of whom projected some kind of goop from his hands to bind them in place. More townspeople crowded in, some carrying bloody weapons, others with rifles slung over their back. Once the room was filled, one of the priests, with more ornate robes than the others and what Dauntless supposed was some sort of modest crown, stood before the prisoners. He began speaking, saying something that sounded solemn, a long prayer or a short sermon. He ended with a gesture to the leftmost prisoner and what sounded like a question. Dauntless knew they wouldn't understand him, so he just shrugged noncommittally. The priests talked with each other for a moment, then one took an ornate knife and a step towards the first prisoner.

Any fool could guess what was going on. Dauntless cried out and stopped the priest. He looked at Dauntless with confusion before slipping out of his grasp and sheathing the knife. He asked a similar question, pointing to the next 53. When Dauntless failed to respond, the priest drew his knife, pointed to the potential sacrifice, and looked at Dauntless. He shook his head, praying to his own god that shaking one's head horizontally meant "no". Luckily, it seemed to; also luckily, the other two from the Earth he knew agreed. The process was repeated; at this point, another priest spoke up and made some broad gestures. After a brief game of mutual charades, Dauntless figured out that he was asking if he wanted all of them to go free. Dauntless nodded, and the one with the crown groaned. The foam-maker gestured, and the foam vanished. The crowd dispersed.

"What should we do now?" Jotun asked.

"We certainly can't stay here, with this bunch of savages," the Empire cape muttered.

"That's a bit harsh," Dauntless said.

"They were about to sacrifice several people to us. How is that not savage?"

"Or odd?" Jotun said. "I am, for one...uncertain about being their god."

"Do we know if there's anyone who doesn't worship us?" Dauntless asked.

The villain shrugged. "I've got an idea that can't hurt." There were still several people in the room—one of the priests, some other locals, a 53, and a couple of kids who stood aside from the others and stared. He went to the priest and pantomimed writing on his hand. The man in question hurried out, and returned with a pen and a pad of off-white and somewhat rough but lined paper. He quickly drew a cross, one of those simple fish you see on Bibles and such sometimes, and a sort of three-part loop that Dauntless was guessing had something to do with God. He showed the paper to the adults, but got nothing but confusion. The cape tore off the paper, crumpled it up, and threw it aside. "Alright, any ideas? I mean, there's the Mozzie star-and-moon, and the Star of David, but—"

The girl ran forward and grabbed the paper, and unfolded it. She called out to her friend and pointed to one of the symbols.

"You recognize that?" Jotun asked.

The girl glanced at her, before holding out her hand to the Empire cape. He handed her the pen, which she used to draw several more symbols, among them a few stars (one next to a crescent), a manger, a flattened heart with a line coming out of the top, a jawbone, and what might have been a spider. The rest were abstract.

Alabaster took the paper back and looked at it. "...Well, she probably doesn't worship us?"


End file.
